The romp, I think, is a difficult genre as it has to be plausible enough for its implausibilities to slip unchallenged through the reader’s brain. Obviously this is entirely subjective, and based primarily on your personal level of engagement with the text. Editorial Board – a lighthearted lesbian spankfic involving a flighty author and her editor – only partially succeeded for me. Although I very much suspect mileage may vary.

Spring Meadows is a bestselling author working for what appears to be an extraordinarily small press. In response to her prima donna ways, and inability to hit a deadline, her publisher has hired a new editor for her, the cool and collected Rachel Templeton. Spring behaves incredibly unprofessionally, essentially involving them both in a power game, which Rachel finally concludes by repeated applications of the “Editorial Board” (i.e. a paddle) to Spring’s frankly entirely deserving arse. Spring’s developing disciplinarian relationship with Rachel helps her with various professional and personal issues, and while there’s no sex or a HEA type ending here, Spring definitely finishes the story in a more positive place than she began it.

Editorial Board is quite self-consciously ramped up to eleven. Nothing about it makes any real world sense at all: not how Spring managed to become a bestselling author working for a press that seems to employ only one human, not how she appears to be paid both a salary and royalties, not how she has a contract with her publisher despite the fact she hasn’t even produced a synopsis for the book she’s supposed to be writing, not her profoundly unprofessional behaviour regarding every single aspect of the publishing process, why she’s using Word on her Mac for heck’s sake, or the … y’know … spanking. But there’s an extent to which I don’t think it’s meant to make sense. It’s meant to be the context that allows for some spanky f/f fun, and it’s probably part of the reason I’m not the best reviewer for this kind of book because, while I’m sure most writers have felt spanked by the editor at some point, I spent too long going “hang on a second” instead of “oh, hee hee.”